Chapter 7:The Best Schools

Ill make sure they go to
the best schools, first grade to collegeMary Johnston

EVERYONE IS IN FAVOR of education.But what do they mean?When
Mary Johnston talks about education she thinks in terms of the best schools,
first grade to college for the education of her children.Yet any student of the history of education quickly learns that the big
issue in education is not the education of ones own children, but the
education of other peoples children.Folks
are mightily concerned about other peoples children: that they might be
neglected, or they might turn out all wrong.They might, for example, turn to crime or fuel a revolution.To reduce these threats they propose to award the government a
substantial responsibility in the rearing and education of other peoples
children.All in all, what people
want out of education is resources for the education of their own children and
rules for the education of other peoples children.It was in the nineteenth century that these notions were most recently
fought out in politics.We are
still living with the results of those battles.

Modern American opinion about education assumes a Year Zero
some time in the mid-nineteenth century, the glorious day when the activists for
modern universal education began their agitation for tax-paid
free-at-the-point-of-service government-run schools.The time before Year Zero is treated as prehistoric, in
England a time of Ragged Schools, one-room schoolhouses, Dotheboys Hall and
Wackford Squeers, and opportunity denied to the poor; in the United States this
time is reported as a time of disorganization, of old field schools in the
rural areas and of segregation between fee-paying academies for the middle class
and charity schools for the poor.Naturally,
the activists for centralized elite-controlled education were anxious to point
to the inadequacy spontaneous bottom-up education.Conditions in the prehistoric time before Year Zero were deplorable and
something had to be done.But what
was education really like before the modern era of centralized government-run
education?What kind of
education did ordinary people seek out for themselves before the elite took
over?And why has the modern elite taken such an interest in the
education of children?

Perhaps it is best to start by listening to an uneducated
voice.The National Geographic
recently did this in an article on life in Chinas Gobi desert at the end of
the twentieth century.After
traveling for three days with 15 camels and five horses, and treating the reader
to disquisitions about desertification and the age of sand dunes, the author
arrived at the home of an old woman living in the sand sea of the Gobi.She didnt understand the outside world, she said:

I only know eating, drinking, and tending animals.This is what my parents did.Their
parents.The young people today,
once they leave the [Gobi], they never return.I dont blame them.The
life of herding is coming to an end.Work
in cities is the future. (Webster
2002)

The reason the young people of the Gobi dont return is
that they all go to boarding school from first to ninth grade, only returning
home in the summer.The best
students go on to high school, or even college.To live the life of a Mongol sheepherder in the manner of their parents
and their parents parents does not need nine years of boarding school.It requires them instead to grow up in the yurt, learning and doing with
their parents.But nine years of
boarding school and a certificate of literacy and numeracy disqualifies them for
herding and certifies them instead for basic competence in the city.So they leave the homes of their fathers and join the global migration to
the city.Once a child has received
a primary education, she is no longer a peasant or sheepherder, she belongs to
the city.

For the herders of the future there is no sense in going to
school.For the cotton-pickers of
the future there is no sense in going to school.There probably is no sense in going to school for anyone planning to
follow in their parents trade.Schools
exist to teach people things that their parents cant teach them.For the peasant, school gives his children a chance to make it in the
city.For the illiterate
costermonger in Victorian London, it gave his sons the chance to move off the
street and sell something that needed a bit of book-learning and bookkeeping.For Mary Johnston of Rock Hill, it gives her children the chance to join
the confident classes in Charlotte for whom life is not a grim struggle but a
creative adventure, not meat-and-potatoes but nouvelle cuisine.Education, then, is all about embourgeoisment, the making of a citizen,
one who lives and works in the city.If
you seek education, you should look in the city.

It the cities of the ancient world, the educational
offerings varied.It is not
surprising to find education in the city states of ancient Greece.In ancient Athens, parents taught their children at home until they were
old enough to go off to school, generally at six or seven.Years of schooling varied, according to the income and interests of the
parents, but anyone could open a school, and parents were able to select a
school for their children that met their needs and their pocketbook.Fees were paid by the month, and poor people generally kept their
children home during the month in which national holidays kept the schools
closed for two weeks.The schools
taught gymnastics, music, and literacy.Of
course, poor and middle class parents could not afford as much schooling as the
rich, and by the time their children reached their early teens they apprenticed
them to a tradesman.But education
might continue, with the tradesman paid to teach his prentices subjects
stipulated in the apprenticeship agreement. (Coulson
1999 p40) Overall literacy in Athens was estimated at about fifty percent.The state played little role in schooling, except in mandatory military
training.

Sparta, of course, developed a state-run education system.At seven, all male children were separated from their families and sent
to boarding school where education consisted of sports, endurance training, and
fighting.Exposure to letters was
minimal, and the teaching of rhetoric, the pride of Athens, was a punishable
offense.Boys were deliberately fed
inadequate meals, and encouraged to steal in order to obtain enough to eat.(Coulson
1999 p46)Literacy in Sparta was considered by contemporaries to be the
lowest in the Greek world.

Education in ancient Rome was curiously warped.In the days of the Republic, classes were mainly taught in private
schools by Greek slaves where discipline was harsh, and teaching styles
unimaginative. The syllabus included reading, writing, and simple counting, and
for those who could afford secondary education, there was rhetoric and the Greek
classics.Under the empire,
schooling began to come under political influence.Augustus suppressed teachers critical of the regime and by the fourth
century, Julian Augustus required that teachers be certified.Teachers earned special benefits in return for faithful service to the
emperor, and gradually earned more and more privileges in exchange for
appropriate praise of the emperor. (Coulson
1999 p55)

In Persia,
immediately before the birth of Islam, children attended elementary schools
similar to those in ancient Athens.The
schools taught grammar and arithmetic, poetry, horsemanship, and swimming.After the introduction of Islam, a new system of schools grew up that
focused on teaching of the Koran.The
secular schools charged tuition while the religious schools were maintained by
charitable grants.By the eighth
century, at the height of Islamic power, circle schools offered
instruction in a wealth of subjects, depending on the teacher.Mathematics, science, medicine, philosophy, literature, jurisprudence,
and other topics were taught widely.The
Islamic state originally played little role in the schools, and education
reached even the poorest children as it was considered beneficial for every
child to have a knowledge of holy scripture.By the middle of the eleventh century under Sultan Malik Shah, however, a
state-run system of education was established to inculcate Sunni orthodoxy and
partisan political aims.

So much for education in the ancient world.It was limited, of course, by the extraordinary expense of hand copied
books.In Germany, in the fifteenth
century, a revolution occurred that changed all that.By 1500, in German towns, people had become very interested in education.[A] public notice proclaimed: Everybody now wants to
read and write. (Coulson
1999 p65)The post-Gutenberg
supply-side revolution in printed books had created a demand for literacy.Things would never be the same again.

Prior to the Reformation education in Germany was obtained
mostly from church schools, but with the printing of books in German, people
wanted to learn to read and write in German.As church schools were not inclined to provide this vernacular
instruction private schools jumped in to meet the demand, teaching reading,
writing, and a little arithmetic to both adults and children.Self-help books were published to assist people in acquiring literacy.But many parents still wanted a Latin education for their children, so
they started to agitate to obtain greater control of the church schoolsin
opposition to the church officials, who felt that the Church had the right to
control education.

This reform of the schools was derailed by the Reformation.Although many of the priests and nuns that staffed the church schools
left the monastery life and others were forced out when the local nobles closed
their monasteries, independent elementary schools eventually appeared to meet
the demand, even greater after the Reformation than before.Unfortunately, Martin Luther put a stop to this.He felt that people could not be trusted to look after their own
education and wanted to be sure that children were educated according to his own
ideas of an orthodox education.He
called for the creation of a government-run education system.In the subsequent competition between private and public education,
attempts were made to close down the private schools, and a long political
conflict ensued between state authorities and local governments and ordinary
citizens.The state authorities
promoted a classical education, but local governments and their citizens wanted
a vernacular education in German.The
top-down emphasis on Latin and the classics created a rift between the learned
elite and the uneducated masses.

In France, the Reformation also posed a challenge to the
status quo.There was a real chance
that, if the Reformation spread into France from Germany, the entire Catholic
Church in the west would fall.A
strong French clergy was needed to defend the Church and to deal with the
Churchs critics so Ignatius of Loyola founded in 1540 the Society of Jesus.It would educate the young and serve the papacy.The Jesuits undertook a massive reform of educational methods,
introducing a grade system to keep children of similar ability and knowledge
together and eliminating routine beatings of students.But the rigid system developed by the Jesuits was not designed to prepare
children for life and work, but to defend the Catholic church from its enemies,
and its Ratio Studiorum, developed in 1600 to define a Jesuit education
in detail, was still in force a century and a half later during the
Enlightenment.Meanwhile, a similar
effort at control was implemented by the king, requiring any school to pass
extensive royal review before approval.Regional
officials also wanted to control schools, mandating attendance at Catholic
schools and catechism thereafter, with severe penalties for failure to conform
that included transfer of children to foster families.

The educational issues in Reformation Europe resonate with
our own timeThen as now, experts
of all stripes were eager to use the educational system to stamp out children
indoctrinated with their pet ideologies.Then
and now, parents seemed to be more interested than the experts in preferring a
practical education for their children that focused on preparation for life and
work.

The French Revolution marks the beginning of the modern era
in education.In France, the
revolution ended the system of royal and church control over education.The National Assembly determined to end the power of the church over the
children of the republic and passed a law making attendance at state-run
schools mandatory.Teachers were
mostly forbidden to teach Catholicism, and instead were taught to worship
Reason and the Supreme Being.Since nuns and priests were mostly forbidden from teaching,
the supply of teachers was sharply reduced.Parents did not appreciate the new state control and often kept their
children at home.Independent
religious schools began to appear again.In
1815 a group of philanthropists opened a monitorial school in Paris.Using ideas imported from Britain, this school used older children to
teach the younger ones.It had the benefit of lowering teacher-student ratios, thus
dealing with the teacher shortage, and lived by the old saying that to really
learn something, it is necessary to teach it.By 1819 there were 600 such schools in France, and by 1821, 1,500. (Coulson
1999 p100)But with the return of the monarchy to power, a fierce attack
was launched upon the monitorial schools, and indoctrination in Catholicism was
mandated in all of Frances schools.For
the rest of the century, education would be highly politicized, and education
was used as a weapon with which to bludgeon political opponents. (Coulson
1999 p104)Under the republic, the schools were used to bludgeon the
church, and under the monarchy and the Empire, they were used to bludgeon the
republicans.

Whereas France entered the modern era with a top-down
centralized education, in the United States a more decentralized system had
developed.Mass education had been
accepted from the earliest days of the colonies and literacy had always been
high.In 1787, free male adult
literacy was estimated at about 65 percent, and in the census of 1850 literacy
was reported as 90 percent.In the
colonial times education was supported with a mixture of private and public
funding.In the rural areas
government schools predominated:

[T]he characteristic school was the district school,
organized and controlled by a small locality and financed by some combination of
property taxes, fuel contributions, tuition payments, and state aid. (Kaestle
1983 p13)

Then as now, many parents were
interested as much in baby-sitting as education.Children as young as two were sent to school to relieve
the mothers of their care at home.Some
poorer children got to attend for free, but most parents paid fees for their
children to attend.Parents
typically enjoyed a degree of control over the schools, particularly as the
teachers often boarded with parents of the children on a rotation basis. (Coulson
1999 p74)In more populous areas, a variety of schools, of varying
degrees of sophistication, competed for the custom of parents.Some schools stuck to the basics; others were focused upon college
preparation, and others appealed to the widest market by advertising a large
range of classes.In the early
republic independent private schools served the majority of children, but free
charity schools sponsored by philanthropy and religious groups catered to the
poor.The charitable efforts
increased in step with urbanization.

In the environment of the early nineteenth century, the
idea of centralized, government-run education for children did not appeal to the
average American.Would-be
education reformers like James G. Carter and Samuel Smith proposed that it was
the duty of the state to compel the ignorant to learn and the superintend the
education of children. (Coulson
1999 p78)But the idea of
compulsion did not achieve much traction until the election of the populist
Andrew Jackson to the White House and the first waves of immigration started in
mid-century, prompting the high-toned Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the Whig Party
to erect a defense against the tide of Democracy and immigration.

In Boston, the Harvard Unitarians wanted to use government
power to dish the Puritans, and the Protestants of every stripe wanted to use
government power to dish the Catholics.So
they nominated Horace Mann, speaker of the Massachusetts state house, to became
secretary of the Massachusetts board of education and implement a solution: a
centralized, government-run system of universal education.Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be
worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the
crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills
would be abridged, wrote Mann. (Coulson
1999 p80)

Horace Mann may have been thinking of using the common
schools for fighting crime, but the lower orders were thinking more about
getting a better education for their children than they could get at the charity
schools.Give us our rights, and
we shall not need your charity, wrotethe
Mechanics Free Press.The
Albany Mechanics Society argued against subsidies going to the
aristocratical nurseries of the wealthy few and argued for the benefits of
government funds generally applied to the really useful instruction of
all. (Kaestle
1983 p138)The working people wanted their children to rise in the
world, and they wanted government subsidy to help them do it.

From its
beginnings in Massachusetts the common school movement quickly spread.By the Civil War the North had been converted to the common school, and
the South followed soon after.From
this beginning the government-run school system slowly expanded upwards and
outwards.High schools became the big idea at the end of the nineteenth
century and the number of years of compulsory education were slowly increased.Educators became better and better and manipulating the political system
for their benefit and education slowly moved away from local and parental
control.

The common school movement immediately provoked a clash
over whose ideas and religious beliefs would rule in the classroom.Mann had promised that all particularities of dogma over which
Protestants disagreed would be removed from school instruction.However, the Protestant Bible, rather than the Catholic Bible was used,
and arguments over which Bible to use resulted in the Philadelphia Bible riots
of 1844.In face of the bigotry of
anti-Catholic public education, the Catholic immigrants felt forced to develop,
through the Catholic Church, a duplicate system of schools in which their
children could be taught Catholic culture.Fortunately, they had in Archbishop John Hughes of New York a leader with
the vision and the tenacity to see such a radical notion through to completion.The Jews, arriving in the United States 50 years later, solved the
problem for themselves by slowly squeezing all religious instruction out of the
public schools.

In England widespread literacy was not as widespread as
early as in the United States.However,
according to E.G. West, literacy increased steadily from the beginning of the
nineteenth century right up until 1870, when government sponsored state
education was legislated.Up until
1833 the government, in the interests of social stability, actively discouraged
the lower orders from acquiring literacy.Still,
by the 1840s, researcher R. K. Webb estimated the literacy among the working
classes as between two-thirds and three-quarters. (West
1994 p164)A survey of miners in the north of England in 1840 showed
that over 50 percent could read and write.Only 21 percent could neither read nor write.The Royal Navy in 1865 reported that 89 percent of seamen
could read, 80 percent of marines, and 94 percent of petty officers.Examination of marriage records showed that the literacy rate of men
getting married rose from 67 percent in 1841 to 94 percent in 1891. (West
1994 p168)All this occurred before
state education had really had a chance to make a difference.It resulted from spontaneous, self-motivated actions by parents acquiring
education for their children even when discouraged by the government.

From what kind of school were the working classes getting
this basic literacy?Chiefly, they
got it from fee-paying schools.In
1813 James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill) wrote of the rapid progress
which the love of education is making among the lower orders in England.He noted that

There is hardly a village that has not something of a
school; and not many children of either sex who are not taught more or less,
reading and writing.We have met
with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but
potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to
send them to school.

Henry Brougham conducted surveys of schools in 1820 and
1828, and found that the numbers in schools had doubled in one decade.A government study found that the numbers had almost tripled, from
478,000 in 1818 to 1,294.000 in 1834.By
1851, the total had increased to 2.1 million, at a time when the total
population of adults and children was 18 million.In 1861, the Newcastle Commission found that essentially every child in
England and Wales was receiving some kind of education.

In England, the nineteenth century was a century of
education.But it was a movement
that occurred spontaneously, from the bottom up.In 1818, the government needed to appoint a parliamentary commission to
find out what was going on.Later
in the century, more government studies were needed to understand the breadth
and depth of this social phenomenon.What
they found was that the English people were almost universally sending their
children to school.Some of the
schools were paid for by charitable organizations; many provided assistance to
those in need.But overwhelmingly,
the schools were funded by fees paid by the parents.Many parents made enormous sacrifices so that their children could attend
school.But they sent them.

Against the slow moves to centralization in Britain and the
United States, the history of education in Germany is salutary.Year Zero for the Germans was the humiliating Prussian defeat in the
battle of Jena in 1806, experienced as a national disaster.In the dark days following defeat the Prussian monarchy reached out to
all sectors of society to rebuild and restore the nation to strength and
self-respect, emancipating the peasants, rebuilding and reforming the army,
extending power to the middle class, and reforming education.It was a crash program of national renewal.Wilhelm von Humboldt, Germanys most revered scholar and friend of
Schiller and Goethe, was called back to Berlin to head the education ministry
and undertake the building of a German national education.He developed a three stage philosophy of education: elementary,
scholastic, and university, encouraging development of the Pestalozzi methods in
the elementary schools.The whole
structure was intended to deliver an allgemeine Bildung or all-around
education that would create citizens capable of thinking for themselves.His crowning achievement was the founding of the University of Berlin,
devoted to Wissenschaft in research and education, that became the
model for the western university.This
was the system that Horace Mann got to experience when he visited the Prussian
education system in 1843 and determined to implement from the top down as
Humboldt had done 30 years before.The
Humboldt reform turned out to be a stunning success.By 1900, Germany had the best scientists and the best army in the world.By 1945 this top-down experiment boasted the most ruined
cities in the world.

This brief history of schooling shows that field of
education has never been tranquil.The
lower classes have struggled to acquire the basics of literacy, and tried to get
the political system to subsidize their expenses.The elite classes have attempted to use the education system
to form the minds of the young to their idea of the good.As governments have instituted almost complete government control over
schooling, education has become intensely political.In the Anglo-Saxon countries of the early-to-mid nineteenth century when
schools were overwhelmingly fee supported, parents were able to obtain an
education for their children that approached their own desires.If they did not like the school their children attended, they could
change it by simply going down the street.But in the age of the government school, this was usually no longer
possible.The centralization and
uniformity preferred by education reformers demanded a one-size-fits-all
approach to education.Parents
found themselves in conflict with teachers, with administrators, with nativists,
with religious sects, and with religious groups in a fight to control their
childrens education.In the
United States, public schools have been used to Americanize immigrants and
celebrate diversity, to teach literacy and to let children find their own way to
reading, to teach tolerance and to teach political correctness, to get back to
basics and to encourage creativity, to teach morality and to allow children to
clarify their own values.But
instead of letting parents use their own judgment in educating their children
and find schools that fit their own choice in the battle of warring polarities,
the system confines them to limited choices dictated by political power at all
levels of government: national, state, and local.In consequence, whereas education used to be flexible and responsive to
its clients, under government control it has become rigid, unresponsive, and
mediocre.

The problem is that different children need different
education.The child of an
illiterate herder in the Gobi desert needs one kind of education.The child of an American college professor needs another.What kind of education did the child of an illiterate costermonger in
London in 1850 need?What does the
child of a Appalachian redneck need?What
does a child of the Christian Right need?What
does the child of a single mother in the inner city need?In the case of Nancy Johnston in Rock Hill, South Carolina,
the need is the best education, grade school through college, an education
that will allow her children to complete the journey from Chester to Charlotte,
and enjoy the rich life, the career open to talents enjoyed by families like the
Bushes.

Of course, the goal of public education has never been to
assist parents in obtaining education for their own children.It has always been about establishing a framework for the education of
other peoples children to make sure that it conforms to grand national
purposes.In the case of the
Prussians, the model beloved of Whig Party common school activists like Horace
Mann, the purpose was to educate children for the army so that Prussia would
never again be humiliated by the French.In
the case of Horace Mann and the Boston Transcendentalists, the purpose was to
preserve their high-toned Protestant Americanism from the uncouth Jacksonian
Democrats and the barbaric Catholic Irish.

You can never be too careful about other people and their
children.That is the philosophy
that has driven the great centralizing movement in education that began with the
German revanchist movement after the Napoleonic Wars and spread to the United
States and to Britain in turn.Educational
activists just could not countenance the idea that parents ought to be
responsible for the education of their children, despite the evidence that they
took their responsibility very seriously.They
knew, or thought they knew, that parents would not raise children to become the
kind of adults that the activists wanted for the future.The Germans wanted cannon fodder; the Americans wanted to block the
Jacksonians and the Catholics; the British wanted to close the gaps.They found that the best method of advancing their goals was to traduce
the parents, to propose that parents were too ignorant or too feckless to
educate their children without supervision.The best policy was the precautionary principle beloved of modern
environmentalists: to place the burden of proof on the parents to prove their
competence to raise their own children.However
experts and politicians reserve the right to try out their own ideas on other
peoples children without limit.

The problem is that the centralized education principle
runs against the most basic idea of the United States, that the American people
are, or ought to be, capable of self-government.That means that they must be presumed to be competent to run their lives
unless they demonstrate otherwise.Surely
there is no more central right of self-government than for parents to educate
their children according to their lights in their own way.

Living in the striver suburb of Rock Hill, Hanna Rosins
Christian Right voter Mary Johnston stands half way between Chester, South
Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina, half way between the redneck
fecklessness of Chester and the shining city of Charlotte where the professional
classes go for education and careers.She lives half way between the redneck world she has left
behind and the educated future she is building for her children.She lives with the shame of her humble roots down the road in Chester,
South Carolina, and the hope vested in her childrens education.She is determined that her children will get the best education, first
grade through college.She
understands that education gives her children the keys to the city, and she
feels a flush of shame at her own educational inadequacy.But the question is: will Mary Johnston be allowed to obtain the best
education for her children according to her lights?Or will she just have to put up with the education that has been selected
by the nations elite as suitable for the education of other peoples
children?

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy. Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit